This local Brooklyn resident sat beside me in the park this morning and made it very clear they wanted in on my (canonical) breakfast of egg and cheese on a bun from a deli.
Remote
Deb Chachra
@debcha@saturation.social
mastodon 4.5.18Engineering professor (on leave 2025-26). Researcher, communicator, connector of things, people, and ideas. Author of HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS. Interested in embodiment, materiality, metacognition, and systems. All enthusiasm is 100% genuine.
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Joined December 27, 2022
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Had reason to return to the incredible story about how unbelievably skilled seamstresses, with expertise in sewing bras and girdles, developed and fabricated the spacesuits for the Apollo missions, as documented by Nicholas de Monchaux.
"ILC’s attitude came through in a seamstress’s comment to a NASA technical team in 1968: “It might look all right on that piece of paper, but I’m not going to sew that piece of paper."”
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-bra-and-girdle-maker-that-fashioned-the-impossible-for-nasa/
Behind my local bike shop this morning.
We did it everybody! The War on Cars is over and the cars _definitely_ lost.
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People say that academics are too cautious and hedge all their assertions about with qualifiers. But it’s really easy not to say, “I’m the first to…” “Nobody else says…” “We’re the only ones who…” You can just say the thing! It’s really easy! At least then you won’t accidentally foreground your ignorance and hubris instead of your insight or accomplishments.
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Was reminded today of the piece on Internet newsletters that @clive@saturation.social wrote for WIRED just about ten years ago, which feels, if anything, even more relevant today: "The pleasure in reading a newsletter comes from the view into a unitary mind at work. Reading [Metafoundry, my newsletter] is like being plugged Oculus-style into her brain while she meditates on science and culture. The best newsletters are all like that: places online where one can talk—and listen—in private." https://www.wired.com/2016/05/rise-of-the-newsletter/
REVEIL, the livestream of field sounds that follows dawn around the world for a full day, has kicked off from a wood in Reading, UK (5am on Sat May 2 to 6am on Sun, UK time).
More about the project: https://soundtent.org/reveil.html
Listen here: https://soundtent.org/reveil/#/
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@mwichary They’re consistent with photolysis as the primary mechanism for deterioration — thicker paint would last longer (so the initially imperceptible variations in thickness from the brush strokes would become visible over time), and underlying paint would be shielded from light by whatever’s on top.
“Why I Keep Returning to Middle Earth”.
This, by Tolkien scholar Michael D. C. Drout, is fascinating: textual analysis reveals the connection between how _The Lord of the Rings_ was written (and revised) and how it feels to read.
But, and also: In the words of @glennf@zeppelin.flights , it “stabs you with a Morgul-blade halfway through”.
In the heart.
I'm nearing the end of a two-month residency at MakerLabs, a community fabrication space here in East Vancouver. I'll write and share more about it online soon, but if you're in the Lower Mainland, please come out this Wednesday, February 25th from 7-8:30pm to see what I've been up to, along with the rest of the cohort!
Link + RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/tools-for-change-showcase-meetup-tickets-1974947151093
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[that’s my own copy, bought secondhand decades ago, the 1982 mass market paperback edition of a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book, which seems like a period piece in itself]
If you haven’t yet read it, you can think of it as a prequel to HALT AND CATCH FIRE?
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@mwichary Also, thank *you* for your review of the new Stewart Brand book, including identifying an important blindspot, siiiiigh. [I’m sure you’ve seen it but I’ve been pointing people to this 2018 piece by Shannon Mattern, which also references the work of themaintainers.org : https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/ ]
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@mwichary [I think it’s probable that municipal signage/professional sign painters would have appropriately primed and prepped surfaces for good paint adhesion, but time and high-energy photons come for us all]
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@futurebird@sauropods.win All my notes in engineering and grad school were exclusively in clear, legible printing (I’d stopped using cursive), which ended up serving me well — while I’m a little envious of all my architect/designer friends and colleagues with ‘cool’ lettering compared to my very plain upper- and lowercase, mine is so much more readable on a whiteboard.
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@mwichary I think the most important contributor is probably light (ie photolysis) — red tends to be particularly sensitive to this so probably not a coincidence that three of your examples are red paint — but other contributors to weathering might include water, air (ie ozone), expansion/contraction with temperature (which is likely different for the paint and the substrate) etc. [This is a generally informed expert opinion, but I’m not a conservator or anything.]
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@mattblaze@federate.social Agreed — I think he’s mostly a chronicler of ‘people doing things together’ rather than being focused on any specific milieu. That said, reading his obits and learning more about his background is very ‘oh yeah, 1981 really _was_ a different time for writers and publishing’.
ICYMI, I wrote a piece for Dezeen on how FIFA’s (entirely self-serving!) mandate that World Cup host cities provide game-day public transit at cost is a unique opportunity for American cities, especially for really car-centric ones — it’s a chance to experiment and to learn from other places that are addressing the same challenges at the same time. https://www.dezeen.com/2026/06/30/world-cup-transit-opinion-deb-chachra/
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@glennf @mwichary You can tell I trained as a scientist because I couldn’t keep myself from including a disclaimer that I’m not an expert. 😆 It was fun to put the pieces together, but I don’t have (much) direct experience of weathered paint. Someone else said they thought it was the binder, and maybe? It does seem likely that the relative contributions of different degradation processes would be specific to a (paint + substrate) system.
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@adamgreenfield @rudi Thanks for getting my book, Rudi! Very much what Adam said -- I couldn't write about infrastructure without at least considering maintenance, but it wasn't my focus. You might appreciate this 2018 article by @shannonmattern, "Maintenance and Care"? https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/
Once again, it's time for that festive tradition of listening to holiday music. A lot of it, at once -- digitized and compressed and tweaked and regenerated into what can only be described as the musical essence of the festive spirit: @bwhitman@hachyderm.io's "A Singular Christmas."
Listen* here (download or stream), plus more details. Because who doesn't love a holiday album that has 'Statement and Methodology' in the liner notes?
https://notes.variogram.com/2009/11/30/a-singular-christmas-2004/
*drone, with occasional silver-y bell
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@sundogplanets @LockEx It should absolutely NOT be part of the STEM curriculum for grade schools. It should be something that children never ever ever have to fucking think about, because the companies that are creating space debris should have to take responsibility for it.
@fugueish@wandering.shop [coincidentally bought both a bacon and cheese croissant and a pastel de nata this morning, ate the croissant for breakfast, and the tart is still sitting on my counter…]
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@adrianhon@mastodon.social @jaybushman@simian.rodeo That thing about a ‘hoax’ really hits home — some friends set up a TEDx Summerisle (ie The Wicker Man) thing on Twitter — live-tweeting it as a fake conference that ended badly, obviously — and it honestly didn’t occur to us that people wouldn’t recognize what it was, instead of feeling deceived. We completely underestimated how the scattershot nature of the medium *reinforced* the versimilitude. It was fascinating but oof, I still feel bad.
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@mattblaze@federate.social Sitting in a cafe in East Vancouver, BC (an hour north of WA) and this is what the intergenerational group at the table next to me is talking about — how they go hiking and camping on the other side of the border, and the impact (and message conveyed) by the sharp rise in costs for non-residents.
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These days I'm generally either heads-down on projects (one of which is standing up the newsletter archives!) or I'm outside, so I really appreciate the folks who sign up for Metafoundry. It's infrequent and substantive, and everything is there in your inbox when you're ready to read. https://buttondown.com/metafoundry
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@mattblaze@federate.social @futurebird@sauropods.win @kevinriggle@ioc.exchange Here’s a bit more on the story, from the Museum of New York: https://www.mcny.org/story/contentious-history-supplying-water-manhattan
Boosted by @cstross@wandering.shop
One for @clive@saturation.social: “Our central hypothesis is that poetic form operates as a general-purpose jailbreak operator.” Adversarial poetry is notably effective at delivering attack prompts for LLMs. https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1
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@adamgreenfield I haven't read it yet, but that's disappointing to hear, if sadly familiar -- even off the top of my head, I can think of several otherwise excellent books that undermine themselves by not seriously engaging with gender issues.
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@mwichary Do you mean deterioration of paint generally, or those specific brush-like patterns?
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@overholt@glammr.us It didn’t make it into the piece but Robert Kraft (net worth: $11.8B) pitched in some pocket change — $5M of the $35M cost to improve Foxborough Station. Since he owns Gillette and the Pats and the Revs he is probably the single person who will benefit most.